cover image Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa, and Carrington

Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa, and Carrington

Mary Ann Caws. Routledge, $29.95 (218pp) ISBN 978-0-415-90134-5

As an advocate of personal criticism and ``life-telling''--``a willing, knowledgeable, outspoken involvement'' in a complex situation--City University of New York professor Caws here intensely projects herself into the loves, lives and works of one well-known writer (Virginia Woolf) and two artists (Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington) who gave up the love of ``normal'' men on behalf of an all-encompassing love for homosexual men (Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey). Unfortunately, this sympathetic, partisan approach, the author's access to hitherto unpublished sources and her comparisons of these women's lives and achievements are compromised by her long, turgid sentences and polemics. Illustrations. (July)